There are musicians—some say there were more of them in the
past—who get as much pleasure from a performance as they give,
who always perform easily and well, and who use themselves so
efficiently that their professional lives and their natural lives
coincide. There are others, however, with equal talent and
training, to whom performance and even practice are exhausting,
and whose professional lives are cut short because they lose the
mastery of the skills they have acquired. They put forth more
effort in solving technical problems than the results warrant, and
ultimately discover that they have used up their reserves of
energy. If they understood the use of themselves as well as they
understand the use of their instruments, such breakdowns would be
far less frequent.

In practice and performance, however, a musician's attention is
given almost exclusively to what he is doing with his hands or his
feet or his vocal organs, and to the sounds they are producing. Of
what he is doing with the rest of his body, he usually knows very
little. In attacking a difficult problem of technique, the average
performer uses two approaches: He “tries hard” to master it, using
all the skill at his command; if his trying builds up too much
tension and fatigues him, he “relaxes.” In both cases he is
working on a trial-and-error basis. He has no way of knowing
exactly how much tension is needed, or how to limit it to the time
and place where it is wanted.

To take a concrete example, a double-bass player, in order to
get the force and control he wanted for finishing the down stroke
of his bow, habitually built up so much misdirected tension in his
arm that he could not start the upstroke smoothly. Furthermore, he
built up a corresponding overtension in other parts of his
body—back, neck, and legs. Since he concentrated his attention
upon his arms and hands, he was unaware of what was happening
elsewhere until it showed up in the form of pain and fatigue.

Any performer who continues in this way runs the risk of
becoming progressively more muscle-bound, and of losing his
freedom of movement. If he recognizes the trouble and attempts to
remedy it by relaxing, he runs into the danger in reverse. Either
he becomes limp and relatively incompetent, or in achieving
relaxation in one part he pays for it by becoming overtense
somewhere else. I know a pianist who succeeded in getting almost
complete freedom in her arms, so that her fingers showed a truly
remarkable sensitivity and power of fluid movement. But in the
process she developed an extraordinary amount of tension in her
neck and an aching heaviness in her back and legs. Her attention
was given exclusively to her arms and hands, and she did not
realize that what she was doing with the rest of her body
exhausted her.

In has often been said that our senses deceive us. This
statement is especially true of the sense of muscular movement, or
kinaesthesia. Often it can be shown that a person is doing
something quite different from what he thinks he is doing. A
pianist, for example, once complained to me that in playing he had
a sense of great weakness in his hands, which increased whenever
he struck certain chords, until it seemed as though he scarcely
had the strength to push down the keys. I discovered that just at
the moment of attack he was tightening the muscles of his lower
arms in such a way that his hands were actually drawn back from
the keys. To overcome this backward pull and strike the chord, he
had to exert a tremendous amount of force. What he sensed was
resistance in the keys and weakness in his hands. The cause, which
he failed to recognize, was misdirected strength. As in the other
examples I have cited, the muscular misuse was not confined to his
arms and hands. He “got set” all over, with an increase of tension
through his neck, shoulders, and back, so that the tension in his
lower arms was literally “locked in” from above. The amount of
tension and the pattern of its distribution were determined by his
past experiences in using his arms, both in playing the piano and
in other activities, and he did not know that there was any other
way of using them.

In most cases, I am convinced that it is futile to attack these
problems directly, because the use of the hand or any other part
of the body is so closely linked to the manner in which the body
as a whole is used. But if a person can be made aware of his
muscular movements as a whole, and learn to distinguish their
general, overall pattern, he can make constructive changes and
corrections on the basis of knowledge rather than trial and error.
Armed with this knowledge, a musician can become, in effect, his
own “expert.”

This new approach to the problem of change has been made
possible by an important discovery F. Matthias Alexander, of
London, made about the nature of reflex action. To my knowledge,
Alexander was the first expert, working with human beings in
ordinary activities of life, to show and prove that there is what
he called the “primary control” within each individual. He defines
the primary control as a “certain use of the head and neck in
relation to the rest of the body.”

By observation and experimentation upon himself, “using,” as John
Dewey said, “the strictest scientific method,” he learned that
the mechanism that determines the character of all reflex action
lies in the reflexes governing the relation of the head to the
neck. When the primary control is functioning as it should, it is
sensed as an integrating force that preserves freedom of movement
throughout the system, so that energy can be directed to the place
where it is wanted without developing strain either there or
elsewhere. Misuse of the primary control, on the other hand, is
always reflected by misuses somewhere else; this appears in the
form of awkwardness, fatigue, and what Wilfred Barlow, a London
physician and pupil of Alexander, calls “maldistributed muscle
tension,” or overtension at one place accompanied by undertension
(lack of tone) at another.

G. E. Coghill, the American biologist, has pointed out that
Alexander's findings agree with what is known of animal movement
in general. The importance of the head in animal movement is well
known, and the dominance of the head-neck reflexes in the reflex
pattern was established experimentally by Rudolph Magnus and
others.

Alexander showed that in human beings under civilized
conditions the head-neck relationship is unconsciously interfered
with, to a greater or lesser degree. His great contribution to
education was the discovery of a means by which a person can
become aware of this interference and regain the normal use of the
primary control. From this discovery and the deductions he made
from it, Alexander established, as Bernard Shaw said in the
Introduction to the volume entitled London Music, “the
beginnings of a far-reaching science of the apparently involuntary
movements we call reflexes.” John Dewey, who introduced
Alexander's work in this country [U.S.A.], said that the
discovery was “as important as any principle that has ever been
discovered in the domain of external nature.”

The principle is general in its application, and not confined
to the problems of musicians. In my experience, however, musicians
have been unusually quick to grasp its significance and put it to
practical use. Perhaps this is because musicians as a class are
keenly aware of the kinaesthetic side of experience. In this
article I have directed attention to the problem of
instrumentalists; but the principle can be used equally
effectively by singers and conductors. Sir Adrian Boult studied
with Alexander in London, and many singers have made use of his
teaching. The value to singers lies in the fact that the primary
control, when it is functioning as it should, prevents
interference in the reflexes that control the vocal organs and the
breathing mechanism. In this connection, it should be noted that
Alexander made his original discovery when he was seeking to find
the cause of his own loss of voice in speaking. An account of his
procedure is given in The Use of the Self (1932).

In teaching the principle to a musician (or to anyone else, for
that matter), the aim is to increase the pupil's awareness of
himself as a whole, until he can detect the interference in the
head-neck relationship, which is the first link in the reflex
chain of “getting set” to do something—to sit down, to pick up a
bow, or to strike a chord. In order to accomplish this, the
teacher helps the pupil to carry out the activity without the
habitual interference, and to realize by actual experience the
lightness and freedom of movement that come when the primary
control operates normally. Through repeated experience of this
kind, the pupil gradually builds up a new standard of kinaesthetic
judgment. With this standard he has the power at any time to know whether he is obtaining the maximum of freedom and
control in what he is doing. If he is not obtaining it he learns
how to find the cause of the trouble and eliminate it.

Because the principle is general in its application, a musician
is learning something he can use to advantage in whatever he is
doing. And conversely, his improved use of himself in everyday
life will be reflected in his music. The double-bass player of my
first illustration reported, as the first tangible results of his
lessons, that he had mowed the lawn without tiring his back, and
had kept his equanimity while asking trespassers to leave his
property. The same kind of conscious control appeared in his
playing and in the ease with which he learned to adapt himself to
the demands of his instrument.

I have not meant to suggest that a primary knowledge of the
primary control can take the place of natural talent or eliminate
the need for technical training and practice. But as a complement
to professional study, the musician will find it invaluable. Over
a period of years I have watched the progress of musicians who
have learned to use this new approach to their problems, and have
witnessed the increasing gain it has brought them in ease of
performance, lessened fatigue, and the confidence that comes with
a true self-knowledge.

Bibliography

Alexander, F. Matthias: The Use of the Self.
Dutton, 1932
Alexander, F. Matthias: The Universal Constant in Living,
Dutton, 1941
Barlow, Wilfred: "Anxiety and Muscle Tension," in the British
Journal of Physical Medicine, May-June, 1947
Coghill, G.E.: Anatomy and the Problem of Behavior.
Macmillan, 1929
Coghill, G.E.: "The Educational Methods of F. Matthias Alexander,"
in The Universal Constant in
LivingDewey, John: Introduction
to The Use of the Self.Magnus, Rudolph: Korpersellung. 1924
Shaw, Bernard: London Music in 1888-1889 as Heard by Corno di
Bassetto (Later known as Bernard Shaw) with some Further
Autobiographical Particulars. Dodd, Mead, 1937

Studies of awareness and of such related topics as consciousness
and attention have recently begun to appear with increasing
frequency in the psychological literature. For a long period of
time—roughly from the 1920's to the 1950's—such concepts were
rejected by psychologists as too vague, subjective and mentalistic
for scientific study. I have never understood the logic of this
position. To me the great appeal of psychology as a science has
always been the prospect of achieving a more rational control of
human behavior—I do not mean other people's behaviour (which is
the way the term is generally used); I mean one's own. But if
“control” is expanded to include “self-control” you have to have a
concept of awareness. So I am glad the term is becoming
scientifically respectable again.

To start out with a tentative definition—awareness is
knowledge of what is going on while it is happening—of what you
are doing while you are doing it. It is a generalized alertness to
present events. It must be admitted, however, that awareness of
what you are doing is not everybody's primary goal. Many people on
the contrary prefer to be unaware of what they are doing.
They aim at a kind of learning that will give them automatically
the right response for any situation. The advantage of learning
something so well that you can do it automatically is, they say,
that you can think of something else while you are doing
it—something that is more interesting or more important. I have
a colleague who always drives the ten miles to school by exactly
the same route at exactly the same time in the morning. With his
mind thus freed from making decisions he can plans his lectures
for the day. Some musicians have told me that they do better when
they do not have to think about what they are playing. An old
Bostonian who had been a concert pianist when she was young but
gave up her career after her marriage was asked to play at a small
dinner party given by Koussevitsky. Searching for something
Koussevitsky did not know she chose a piece which she had not
played since the turn of the century. All she remembered was the
opening chords, but by abstracting herself and looking steadily at
a picture of a mountain lake which hung behind the piano she was
able to finish the piece without a flaw and with the warm applause
of the host. Had she thought for a minute of what she was doing,
she said, the feat would have been impossible.

Countless examples could, I am sure, be cited of this ability
to carry out smoothly a skilled and well-learned performance while
following a totally different train of thought. It is not always
an advantage, however. Stories about absent-minded professors are
legion. In most of them the professor appears as a lovable
eccentric who does something inappropriate or ridiculous while his
mind is on higher things. Such episodes are less funny if they
happen to you. Once you are in the habit of thinking of other
things than what you are doing it may become hard to stop. And
there is no guarantee that these other things will be “higher.” Another musician with the ability to play automatically was not so
successful as the old Bostonian in keeping his mind on peaceful
scenes. Halfway through a concert performance he started thinking
about a quarrel he had had that morning with his wife. This train
of thought became so absorbing that by the end of the second
movement in the piece he was playing, his attention was engrossed
completely. He was unable to start the third movement and had to
leave the stage with the piece unfinished.

In my view the chief disadvantage of automatic performance is
that without awareness it cannot be changed. Socrates when asked
whether it was better to do wrong knowingly or unknowingly shocked
his listeners by replying that it was better to do it knowingly.
If you know that it is wrong, he explained, you can change.
Otherwise, you cannot.

Even if a habit is good, it loses something if it becomes
unconscious and stereotyped. People grow older, circumstances
change, fashions change and a manner of responding or a style of
performance may cease to be appropriate. It is not enough for
someone else to point this out, however. You have to know yourself
what you are doing in order to change it.

I should like to discuss a method for reorganizing awareness in
such a way that a performance can be well-learned without becoming
stereotyped and mindless, and hence incapable of change. The key
is to be found in the relation between awareness and another
conscious state, attention. Awareness, as I conceive it, is a
general, unfocused condition in which a person is wide awake and
alert to whatever may be going on without being concentrated on
anything in particular. Attention, on the other hand, is focused
on some particular aspect of the field. It has been compared to a
spotlight on a dark stage. William James defines it as “the taking
possession by the mind” of one out of several possible objects or
trains of thought. (1) (Physiologists say that attention can be
distinguished from inattention by measurable differences in brain
waves, heart rate and other indices.) The ability to give
attention—to concentrate—is much sought after and is often
valued in proportion to its intensity and the degree to which
everything else is shut out. The often cited examples of
Archimedes drawing circles in the sand, unaware that the city of
Syracuse had been captured; and of Scaliger intent upon his
commentary of Homer while the Massacre of St. Bartholomew took
place outside his window, are extreme cases, to be sure, but they
illustrate the common notion of concentration as a narrowing of
the field of attention. They also illustrated the danger in
concentration—the danger that something important is happening outside the field of attention without being observed. The
spotlight may be too bright and the rest of the field too dark to
make the observation. In the method which I am going to describe,
attention instead of being narrowed is expanded to take in certain
key relations in the body as well as the activity on which
attention is focused. To use the figure of the spotlight and stage
again, this time the spot is still bright but the stage is merely
dim instead of blacked out.

The organism has at various times been divided and subdivided
into a great many parts and categories—the mind and the body,
the five senses, the vascular system and the like. Though for
purposes of study these categories are convenient and perhaps
necessary, there is always a danger of thinking that the divisions
are real, and it is customary nowadays to start any treatise on
human behavior by affirming the unity of the organism. There is
one division, however, that is seldom questioned—the division
between self and environment. It is regularly assumed that
attention must be directed either outward into the environment or
inward into the self. Gibson in a new and stimulating book on The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems rejects
completely the traditional classification of sense data. He keeps,
however, the dichotomy of “outward” and “inward” using the term
“perception” for one and “proprioception” for the other. (2)
“Perception,” he says, “has to do with the environment.
Proprioception with the body.”

I should like to take a strictly unitarian approach to the
problem and deny the necessity for making any such division, even
for convenience. Information about the state of the body and the
state of the environment is being recorded in the brain at one and
the same time. Attention is ordinarily directed either one way or
the other but there is no reason why this need always be the case,
since the organism is capable of selecting the stimuli to which it
will respond.

A scientist in a laboratory bent over a microscope tends to
give his attention exclusively to the specimen he is examining. If
in the course of time he becomes aware of pain or discomfort in
his neck and back he either ignores it or stops what he is doing
in order to give it attention. It is perfectly possible, however,
to integrate the two fields, inward and outward, into one, by
selecting elements from both for simultaneous attention. When the
two fields are integrated in this way, the stimulus pattern and
the response pattern can be recorded within the same spotlight of
attention, so that cause-and-effect relations between them can be
perceived.

When you start making observations in this way you discover
that your sensations of muscular tension, heaviness, stiffness,
and their opposites are not chaotic and meaningless but have a
central pattern which changes in response to the changing pattern
of stimuli from without or to the changing thought-images or
“free-associations” within. Finding this pattern is like finding
the clue that leads out of a maze. It introduces order where
confusion prevailed.

If a response is delayed as it is in waiting for a light to
change in traffic, you are often aware that muscular tension is
building up in preparation for the movement to come. Preparatory
activity or “set” is presumably present before all learned
responses, whether delayed or not. A set in this sense of the term
is an attitude of expectancy which facilitates a learned response.
You are most apt to become aware of a set when the expected does
not occur as when a shovel full of snow is heavier than is looks,
or there is one less stair to climb than anticipated.

Sets differ from one another according to the expected
character (the “idea”) of the response and the previous experience
of the subject. There are sets for speaking; for picking up a
pencil; for getting up from a chair; for smoking a cigarette; for
playing the piano. Sets speed the response and make it easier to
carry out automatically. They do not always make the response
better, however. Sometimes they get in the way. This is especially
noticeable in complex, sequential activities. A pianist may blur
the execution of a measure because he is already getting set for
the next. Or a string-player may have difficulty bowing because he
becomes set too soon for the reverse movement of the bow. So in
reading aloud the eye may get ahead of the speech organs and
impose a set for another word before the first has been completely
articulated.

A set may be imposed very quickly after the stimulus is given,
but it is never instantaneous. It starts with a change in tonus or
tensional balance in the neck and trunk and spreads from there to
the limbs so that there is a general postural change before the
particular goal-directed part of the pattern appears. (3)

The postural component can best be studied in another response
pattern, a pattern which is not goal-directed and is presumably
unlearned. In response to a sudden loud noise an involuntary
postural change takes place. Though the response is sometimes over
in half a second it has a regular time sequence, starting in the
muscles of the face and neck and passing down the body. When it is
complete it always involves the muscles of the neck. (4) Without
them apparently the response cannot be propagated, or spread.

The pattern of startle (which has been studied by high-speed
photography) is remarkably regular. (5) It begins with an
eye-blink; the head is then thrust forward; the shoulders are
raised and the arms are flexed. The pattern permits minor
variations but its primary features are the same. Because the
startle response is brief and unexpected, it is difficult to
observe and more difficult to control. Its chief interest here
lies in the fact that it is a model of other, slower response
patterns: fear, anxiety, fatigue, and pain all show postural
changed from the norm which are similar to those that are seen in
startle.(6) In all of them there is a shortening of neck muscles
which displaces the head, and which is usually followed by some
kind of flexion response, so that the body is drawn into a
slightly smaller space. As in startle these postural responses
cannot take place without the prior displacement of the head and
the shortening of neck muscles. Since these responses are much
slower than the startle response, they can be changed by
controlling the first stage in the pattern, the head displacement,
through which the rest of the pattern is propagated. Changing a
response pattern in this way is quite different from suppressing
it or ignoring the stimulus, which may well call for a response.
Changing the postural pattern simply insures that the response
will be rational and appropriate to the situation instead of an
irrational stereotype. By reorganizing the field of attention both
phases of the response pattern are taken in at the same time. The
goal-directed phase (the learned part of the pattern) is allowed
to continue, while the set is controlled by the method which I
have described. Awareness of the head-neck-trunk relation serves
as a framework for the learned activity. By inhibiting the set or
fixation of the head, a better distribution of tonus is obtained
in the trunk and limbs and better coordination and control of the
specific activity, whether it is speaking, or writing, or playing
the flute.

Elsewhere? I have advanced the view that the physiological
mechanism which makes these effects possible is the head-neck
reflexes, which integrate and modulate the response of the
organism to gravity. Briefly, release of neck-muscle tension,
allowing surface muscles in the neck to lengthen, increases the
antigravity response in postural muscles; shortening the same
muscles decreases the strength of the response. It is well
established that head-neck reflexes are used by animals to change
the distribution of tonus in the trunk and limbs and that the same
mechanism probably operates in human beings.

It is unnecessary, however, to know why the mechanism
works in order to use it. The chief difficulty lies in the fact
that we are not accustomed to making kinesthetic observations and
prefer to accept the evidence of our other senses or somebody
else's judgment rather than critically examine our feelings of
tension and weight. The only satisfactory technique I know for
dealing with this problem was devised by F.M. Alexander (8) some
60 years ago. By watching himself in a triple-mirror, Alexander
was able to correlate changes in the axis of his head with a loss
of voice in speaking. He found that by inhibiting the change in
head-axis he not only regained the use of his voice but produced
an unexpected redistribution of tension throughout his body which
brought with it an improvement in breathing and other automatic
functions. For imparting his discovery to others, he developed a
non-verbal technique which is referred to as the Alexander
Technique. In it the pupil learns to inhibit any tendency he may
have to alter the reflex balance of his head, while the teacher
initiates some simple, everyday movement and guides the pupil
through to its completion. Any movement will do: walking, shifting
position in a chair, getting up and sitting down, picking up a
pencil. During this kind of movement (which should be called
‘reflex facilitated,’ rather than active or passive) postural
tonus is redistributed. This is perceived by the subject as
reduction in the feeling of weight and in the effort needed to
move. This kinesthetic effect persists long enough after a lesson
to give the pupil an opportunity to observe his own habitual
actions against a new background of postural tonus. In this way he
gradually builds up a standard of kinesthetic judgment for himself
and can go on to make further observations and experiments of his
own. In doing so he has added greatly to his resources for
self-improvement.

It should be possible to make the necessary first observations
without help from outside—it has been done at least once
before—but most people lack the patience and insight to do so
without instruction. Fortunately the instruction is easier to
obtain than it once was.

To end with a quotation from the Greeks, Sophocles said:

The ideal condition would be, I admit,
That man should be right by instinct;
But since we are all too likely to go astray
The reasonable thing is to learn from those who can teach. (9)

Frank Pierce Jones was born and educated
in Wisconsin. After receiving his B.A. and M.A. degrees in
Classics at Stanford University, he received his Ph.D. at
Wisconsin University in 1937. The same year he began teaching
Greek and Latin at Brown University.

In 1938, in the hopes of improving his health,
Jones began having lesson with A.R. Alexander (F. Matthias
Alexander's brother). In 1940, he began lessons with F. Matthias
Alexander. A year later, Jones entered the three year
teacher-training course being offered by F.M. Alexander in
Massachusetts.

After completing his training, Jones decided to
devote himself to helping to establish the scientific validity of
Alexander's work. Jones was strongly encouraged by
John
Dewey to proceed with scientific
research into the Alexander Technique. Jones left his teaching
position at Brown, and, in 1954, began to conduct experimental
research at the Institute for Psychological Research at Tufts
University into the physiological and behavioral principles
underlying Alexander's method. Over the next 20 years, he
published numerous papers on these subjects, wrote a book on his
studies of the Alexander Technique, Body Awareness in Action
(recently republished under the title Freedom to Change,
see below), and became a full professor of psychology at Tufts
University in 1972.

Jones continued his research and teaching of
the Alexander Technique, and concurrently continued to teach
Classics at Tufts as Professor Emeritus, until his death in
1975.

Freedom to Change by Frank Pierce Jones is available
from: AmSAT Books